Sunday, December 9, 2012

Quote of the Day: Lord Monkton

Quietly, politely, authoritatively, I told the delegates [at the UN Climate Change Conference in Doha] three inconvenient truths they would not hear from anyone else:

There has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of these wearisome, self-congratulatory yadayadathons.

It is at least ten times more cost-effective to see how much global warming happens and then adapt in a focused way to what little harm it may cause than to spend a single red cent futilely attempting to mitigate it today.

An independent scientific enquiry should establish whether the U.N.’s climate conferences are still heading in the right direction.

As I delivered the last of my three points, there were keening shrieks of rage from the delegates. They had not heard any of this before. They could not believe it. Outrage! Silence him! Free speech? No! This is the U.N.! Gerrimoff! Eeeeeeeeeagh!

One of the hundreds of beefy, truncheon-toting U.N. police at the conference approached me as I left the hall and I was soon surrounded by him and a colleague. They took my conference pass, peered at it and murmured into cellphones.

Trouble was, they were having great difficulty keeping a straight face.

Put yourself in their sensible shoes. They have to stand around listening to the tedious, flatulent mendacities of pompous, overpaid, under-educated diplomats day after week after year. Suddenly, at last, someone says “Boo!” and tells the truth.

Frankly, they loved it. They didn’t say so, of course, or they’d have burst out laughing and their stony-faced U.N. superiors would not have been pleased.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Pages

About Me

I am a fifty-something year old father of three who has been happily married for 25 years. I am interested in money management, and software development. I've been a steady investor for all of my life and have typically been successful when I've followed my own instincts, and been less successful when following the advice of others. Some of the people I look up to in the investment world are Warren Buffett, John Templeton and Jack Bogle.